ProFound Therapeutics Launches with $75M from Flagship Pioneering

Flagship Pioneering has unveiled ProFound Therapeutics, a company founded at Flagship Labs in 2020. The company’s ProFoundry Platform has uncovered tens of thousands of novel proteins, remapping the landscape of the human genome and vastly expanding the number of potential therapeutic targets. Flagship has initially committed $75M to advance the platform and generate an initial pipeline of novel therapeutics.

“Two decades ago, the Human Genome Project reached the consensus that there were just 20,000 protein-coding genes, based on a well-defined boundary of what we call a protein,” said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and Chairman of ProFound Therapeutics. “We asked ourselves, ‘What if we are overly constrained by these rules, and the proteome is actually much larger than previously understood?’”

Afeyan continued, “It turns out that by focusing on proteins in the process of translation, together with the innovative application of technology and new biological insights, we have found tens of thousands of undiscovered human proteins that could provide countless new intervention points across diseases. This discovery redefines what we know about human biology and marks the beginning of a new era in biomedicine, with unlimited potential for patient impact.”

“ProFound is systematically decoding this expanded proteome to understand how these proteins govern biology and enable the development of novel therapeutics across the spectrum of human diseases,” said Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D., Flagship Pioneering General Partner and Co-Founder and CEO of ProFound Therapeutics. “Through the ProFoundry Platform, we have already uncovered many new mechanisms of disease that present untapped therapeutic avenues, including new genetic disease targets, circulating factors, and immune system modulators, among others. This new biology opens a vast frontier, which we believe could unleash multiples of the biotechnology industry.”

Flagship Pioneering is a Cambridge investment firm that creates its own biotechs and is best known for mRNA vaccine developer Moderna. The current Flagship ecosystem comprises 41 companies. (Source: ProFound Therapeutics Website, 26 May, 2022)